Tip Jar

In your description of Oldton Park you suggest that there may have been a pond. I am delighted to be able to confirm that there was a pond and not just any old pond. I recall "sailing" my most treasured toy, a battery operated model motor boat, on the pond on many occasions. The pond was oval in shape and had a tarmac path around its perimeter. There were benches positioned every ten yards or so along the path way to allow parents and grandparents to sit down and rest while their children and grandchildren sailed their model boats on the pond. The pond was not very deep and no afternoon was complete without some poor parent having to wade in and rescue a capsized model sailing boat. When it was very sunny the children would get in and paddle in the pond. There was nothing like the Oldton Park pond where I lived and the only times I could use my model boat was when I went to Oldton for the holidays.

As I think back now I don't think I was ever happier as a child than when I was playing with that model boat in the sunshine at Oldton Park pond. Just over a foot long and technologically incredibly crude by modern standards my "Cabin Cruiser" (what a dated phrase that is) was just over a foot long. Its propeller was driven by a little electric motor which in turn was powered by two U2 batteries. There was no fancy radio control. You just positioned the rudder to steer the boat in the direction you wanted it to go, pressed the button, put it in the water and off it went. Then you scampered to the other side of the pond to collect it as it approached the edge. It seems astonishing now to recall how much pleasure this simple pastime could give.

I remember the pond ringing with the excited voices of children, the barking of pye dogs and the exasperated shouts of parents. It is sad to think that Oldton has gone and never again will a child launch his or her boat on the high seas of Oldton Park pond.

He nudges down through second, letting it hang in neutral as the junction coasts upto meet him, to softly dock, so there’s a few beats freefor scanning the bookie’s window as it passesto the corner, where his death’s been loitering, ready to snatch the wheel, twist,launching the car to hopskew-whiff across the cycle-laneand up the kerb; one last small flingbefore it nuzzles in along the verge,a clumsy feeder coughing to a stop.

But Dad, not one to leave a job undone, keeps on, along the slow route backthrough the rear-view mirror, dwindlingnine years now down moonless lanesbeyond the town’s last lights and his usual turn for home, where I’m still stalled and waiting,clock-watching, wanting to knowwhat kind of bloody time he thinks this is.

My father, Bill, also went off in his car and didn’t come back. Not that he killed himself, unless you count the fifty fags a day for thirty-odd years, but he still wound up dead. He set off to fill the tank and, on the way, suffered a massive heart attack whilst – considerately, consciously, one would like to think – steering his Vauxhaul Astra gently into a verge.

‘But what has this got to do with Oldton?’, I hear you ask in that disembodied voice of yours. After all, it happened in a small Lincolnshire town with its own very definite and different name. Well, over the intervening years I have come to believe that, in a roundabout way (travelling clockwise, in other words – he was an aficionado of the corny joke), my father was en route to Oldton at the time.

Dad went to the petrol station in preparation for a short holiday with my mother. They were due in North Norfolk the following day and mum didn’t want them to go: she thought – she knew? – that he was too ill to drive that far. Afterwards, what with the funeral and the grief, with everyone and everything that needs to be taken care of after a death, it never occurred to me to ask where they had been going. But now I’m almost certain: their putative destination was Oldton. Mrs Millaby’s guesthouse by the beach, to be precise.

Dad never got to fill the tank, never came home. Although, reassuringly, he’s still around sometimes, very early on weekday mornings when I’m doing yoga downstairs and I feel compelled to stretch and sway facing the empty room, his presence too strong to turn my back on.

I am sure that Muriel has got this right. I recall going to the cinema at Oldton during my summer stays there in the 1960s. Even more impressive is the fact that Muriel spells the name correctly. It was Capitolwith an onot Capital with an a. Being named presumably after the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the architectural style of which was feebly echoed in the faux classicaldesign of thefoyer.I recall being takento the Capitolas a treatat least onceduring all three"holidays" I had at Oldton in the 1960s. Memory may be playing tricks on me but I rather think on every occasion the film showing was MaryPoppins. Even now some 40 years later I cannot hear the name Dick van Dyke without shuddering.

I can't place them anywhere; I can't recall quite how we got there, but our uncles and our grandads had their sheds there, where old picnic chairs took on the airs of thrones and dented Thermos flasks gave off a scent of sugared milk.

They were a man's world, earthy brown and growing green and spreading quiet.

Do you remember the village hall? There used to be some great discos organised by the vicars wife. Unfortunatly they stopped abruptly. We never knew why, but all thought it was something to do with Mr James smooching with the lower school netball team

Drinking lager and black, and eating so many pork scratchings you were sick, all the boys sat down one side of the room trying to look cool in thier tesco jeans and strippy tank tops dancing to Mud and Status Quo; all the girls giggling in the toilets and sitting down the other side of the room and sequence dancing to Showwaddywaddy; only to come together for the last slow dance: "I'm Not In Love" - 10 cc.

I always pretended I had to help clear away the sandwiches but really was too scared to talk to girls.

Anyway i think the dj was called Sean. He is still gigging. I found he is appearing at a scout hut in the village of Islington:

WEEKLY TUESDAYS (OCT 19-NOV 9) @ BAR ACADEMY
GUILTY PLEASURES
Sean Rowley and his disreputable cast of cohorts are hosting four weekly parties at Bar Academy with those great records by bad pop stars.Guilty Pleasures has grown since the release of the eponymous compilation back at the end of August and a series of near legendary 'do's' since. Doors 8pm-12am / £7 adv (£5 concs).
Tues 19th Oct: First up, it's the very special Terry Hall + guests
Tues 26th Oct: It's the turn of Adam & Joe + Saint Etienne
Tues 2nd Nov: Sean will be joined by Simon 'Fast Show' Day and the boys from Lemon Jelly (tbc)

It might be worth meeting up there to see if Speccy Watson will still let you kiss her for 5p behind the garages.

There is a small coffee shop on a hidden side street. A lady called Shirley bakes her own chocolate brownies and serves you filter coffee from a never-ending pot. It is the sort of place where you can sit for hours scribbling in your notebook and no-one will disturb you.

This is not where the memory lives.

If you finish your coffee, say goodbye to Shirley and walk out of the shop you will notice that opposite there is an entrance to an alleyway. Go through the alleyway and walk up the steps (there are quite a few). This will take you to the very edge of Oldton. There are a few houses but walk past them until you find yourself walking up a hill.

Old Miss Seewood, over 150 years old and lived by the river. She caught me throwing sticks at her horse chestnut tree and invited me in to her cottage. Thinking she was a witch I agreed.

We sat next to a carp pond and she opened up several old shoe boxes. Thus I was introduced to the variety of shape, size and colour of the birds' eggs they contained. Their terrible smell troubled me little mingling as it did with the stench of the old woman herself.She started to talk of buntings and warblers. Soon we whispered of the nightjar and its dusky flight through corridors of willow.

I would visit her four times a week. We ate curly whirlys with our hot tea and I talked more and more of my trips to the riverbank, my ornithology. I saw kingfishers, corncrake,smew.

She grew more respiratory and restrained. She sensed her end and had a plot in the village churchyard. A week before she left I asked her once again for news of the nightjar, a bird I knew I would never see.

"Only in Owlton are the nightjars truly at ease. We would watch them for hours on end, my love and I. They called out for us"

I wonder, Tim, if you remember any of the birds of Oldton. Could I have misheard, with my budding twitcher's ear, the nightjar's favourite home?

I have been looking into the possibility of locating Oldton through its postcode. Below is a letter I received this morning from Andrew Callum who is Head of Postal Demographics at the Royal Mail. He sheds some interesting light on stray postcodes and also mentions, in passing, Britain's lost towns, or as he calls them - reserve towns.

"Dear Jonathan,

I am sorry that it has taken so long to reply to your letter. It was forwarded to my office on the understanding that I am best qualified to respond to your enquiry. I am not certain that this is true, but I will try my best.

In answer to your question regarding stray postcodes, I can confirm that they did exist and still do today, although not officially.

These postcodes came into being after the Second World War, when a shortage of building materials meant that houses were often demolished and then rebuilt in different locations, and often in different towns, where sustained bombing had resulted in a scarcity of living accommodation.

The houses were generally derelict properties or were relocated from reserve towns – temporary settlements built before and during the war. The buildings were taken apart brick by brick and then used to plug the gaps in streets where there had been heavy damage to infrastructure. You can still see various extreme examples of this mismatched architecture around London, where small country cottages were inserted into gaps between rows of terraced houses.

When these houses were moved from their original locations, they kept their existing postcodes. Eventually some of them were reclassified according to their new whereabouts, however in a large number of cases this didn’t happen. The result was that you ended up with a street full of houses all with local postcodes and then one or two that had postcodes belonging to other far-flung parts of the UK.

I don’t know if you are familiar with post office protocol circa 1970-1997 but I will assume that you are not. Every postal sorting office in the UK is licensed by Royal charter to deliver letters to only those postcodes listed on their charter. These postcodes are generally those within the general vicinity of the sorting office.

The consequences of this charter was that postal sorting offices were not authorised to deliver mail to those houses who, while being in the local area, possessed none-local postcodes. To all intents and purposes these houses with stray postcodes didn’t exist and in time they faded completely off the map. They didn’t get bills. They weren’t listed on either the electoral or voting registers. If you lived in one of these properties you would find it very difficult to obtain social security benefits and I believe it was nigh impossible to apply for either a bank account or a credit card.

Naturally this kind of dwelling attracted a very particular class of tenant, namely one who had decided to opt out of society and wanted to get on with their life without the bother and interference of the government. In 1990 some attempt was made to clear up this mess after utility companies complained that they were losing money from properties that were proving difficult to locate. As many of these houses came from reserve towns that no longer existed (all of their properties having been relocated to other areas) there was some talk of fraud.

The Royal Mail was tasked with tracking down all properties with stray codes and formally issuing them with local postcodes. This proved more difficult than it sounds. A lot of the residents of these properties kept rather unkempt looking dogs which they used to chase representatives of the post office away. There was a very ugly stand-off fought, both on front doorsteps, and in various local courts, who found themselves having to adjudicate on what was then a very grey legal area.

What also became apparent, during this time, is that a lot of the people who were living in these properties were in contact with each other and had formed a united front. In time, various Heritage groups were drawn into the argument. There was an opinion that since many of these houses originated in English towns that no longer existed, they should be afforded some kind of protected status and this should cover their postcodes, which were a reminders of these lost British settlements.

Eventually it was decided that the houses would be allowed to retain their stray postcodes and that all mail to these properties would be forwarded to a sorting office in Milton Keynes. There were two poor men whose job it was to pick up these letters from the depot and drive around the country delivering them.

Since 2002, a new computer system has done away with the Milton Keynes depot. While the relocated houses retain their original stray postcodes, officially they have been re-classified with local codes. When the system encounters a letter to an address with a stray postcode, the computer matches the stray code with the official code and then sends the letter on its way.